Abstract: The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration is one of 16 regional projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The project is led by Battelle in Richland, WA, and includes participation by University of Washington, 10 utilities across the five state region of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, and five technology providers including IBM Research, IBM Netezza, Alstom Grid, 3TIER and QualityLogic. The five main objectives of the project are to invest in regional smart grid infrastructure, quantify costs and benefits of smart grid technology, develop a wide area communications protocol, contribute to smart grid standards and to facilitate the integration of wind and other renewable energy resources through a smart grid application called transactive control. The Project Director, Dr. Ron Melton, will present an overview of the project with emphasis on transactive control of assets throughout the electric power system.

Biography: Dr. Ronald Melton is the director of the Battelle led Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration project, the administrator of the GridWise® Architecture Council, and a senior technical leader for smart grid research and development projects at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He has over 30 years of experience applying computer technology to a variety of engineering and scientific problems. In addition to smart grid related projects, recent experience includes research and engineering in cyber security for critical infrastructure protection and process control system security. Dr. Melton is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.